Magnifying voters' preferences: Bias in elections to Birmingham's City council

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 69-103

  Thrasher, Michael ^a   Johnston, Ron ^b   Rallings, Colin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PLYMOUTH   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 56249127915     PISSN: 00221953     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/002219504323091243     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor (eds.), Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997);
2. Christopher Stevens "The Electoral Sociology of Modern Britain Reconsidered," Contemporary British History, XIII (1999), 62-94.
3. Johnston et al., From Votes to Seats: The Operation of the UK Electoral System since 1945 (Manchester, 2001);
4. Johnston idem, "Labour Electoral Landslides and the Changing Efficiency of Voting Distributions," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, XXVII (2002), 326-361.
5. Sam Davies and Bob Morley, County Borough Elections in England and Wales, 1919-1938: A Comparative Analysis. I. Barnsley to Bournemouth (Aldershot, 1999);
6. Christopher Phillips (ed.), Birmingham Votes 1911-2000 (Plymouth, 2000).
7. County boroughs were established by late nineteenth-century legislation to extract the country's largest towns and cities from their surrounding counties and enable them to raise revenues and deliver services independently, within the constraints of national legislation.
8. Jorgen S. Rasmussen, The Liberal Party: A Study of Retrenchment and Revival (London, 1965);
9. Roy Douglas, History of the Liberal Party, 1895-1970 (London, 1971);
10. Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910-1924 (Oxford, 1974);
11. Chris Cook, The Age of Alignment: Electoral Politics in Britain 1922-1929 (London, 1975);
12. idem, A Short History of the Liberal Party, 1900-88 (London, 1989; orig. pub. 1976);
13. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1983);
14. Geoffrey R. Searle, The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration 1886-1929 (London, 1992);
15. Alan Sykes, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism 1776-1988 (London, 1997);
16. John Stevenson, Third Party Politics since 1945: Liberals, Alliance and Liberal Democrats (Oxford, 1993);
17. Don MacIver (ed.), The Liberal Democrats (London, 1996).
18. Asa Briggs, A History of Birmingham. II. Borough and City 1865-1938 (London, 1952);
19. Richard Jay, Joseph Chamberlain: A Political Study (Oxford, 1981);
20. Peter T. Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics (New Haven, 1994);
21. David Cannadine, "Locality: The 'Chamberlain Tradition' and Birmingham," in idem (ed.), In Churchill's Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain (London, 2003), 117-133.
22. Kenneth Newton, Second City Politics (Oxford, 1976), 17.
23. Phillips, Birmingham Votes.
24. Brian Keith-Lucas, The English Local Government Franchise: A Short History (Oxford, 1952).
25. Rallings, Thrasher, and James Downe, One Vote, One Value: Electoral Re-districting in English Local Government (Aldershot, 2002).
26. The Metropolitan boroughs were units within newly defined metropolitan counties (the West Midlands conurbation in Birmingham's case), allowing a division of responsibilities for various local services and revenue-raising powers. Birmingham (which retained its status as a city) lost its independence for the period in which the metropolitan counties existed (they were abolished in 1986). Weoley's electorate in 1973 was actually larger than the entire elec-torate for the country's smallest local authority, Rutland District Council, which had 19,161 persons on its electoral register. During the 19305, the Conservative-led governments declined to conduct a review of Parliamentary constituency boundaries, despite extensive evidence of substantial disparities in electorates. If enacted, these boundaries would certainly have benefited the Labour party. See Johnston et al., "The Conservative Century? Geography and Conservative electoral success during the twentieth century," in David Gilbert, David Matless, and Brian Short (eds.), Geographies of British Modernity: Space and Society in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2003), 54-79.
27. After 1974, the three-yearly elections were set within a four-yearly cycle. Birmingham City held elections in each of the first three years of the cycle, contesting one position per ward. In the fourth year, whole-council elections were held for the West Midlands county council. After the county council was abolished, the cycle of elections for the borough council was retained. One-third of the Council was re-elected for a four-year term in each of the first three years of the cycle, with no elections in the fourth.
28. The 1931 election is excluded from this calculation because Labour failed to win a single seat. In 1931, Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government collapsed, and the party split. MacDonald led a minority of his colleagues into a Conservative-dominated-coalition "National Government," for which he was the first prime minister. The split resulted in Labour's poor performance in local-government elections nationally. The 1968 election is also excluded from this calculation because Labour failed to win a single seat; the national Labour government headed by Harold Wilson was extremely unpopular. See William Hampton, Democracy and Community: A Study of Politics in Sheffield (Oxford, 1970).
29. Rallings and Thrasher, "Local Voting in Birmingham 1911-2000," in Phillips (ed.), Birmingham Votes, xix-xxx;
30. Anthony Sutcliffe and Roger Smith, History of Birmingham. III. Birmingham 1939-1970 (London, 1974).
31. Davies and Morley, County Boroughs;
32. Phillips (ed.), Birmingham Votes.
33. Robert B. McCallum and Alison Readman, The British General Election of 1945 (London, 1945). Edward Heath's government was unpopular because of inflation, wage constraints, and bitter conflicts with the miners and other trade unions.
34. The seats-to-votes ratio is the percentage of contested seats won by a party, divided by the percentage of the votes cast for them.
35. Ralllings, Thrasher, and Johnston, "The Slow Death of a Governing Party: The Erosion of Conservative Electoral Support in England 1979-1997," British Journal of Politics and International Relations, IV (2002), 271-298.
36. Some U.S. studies of electoral bias and disproportionality have incorporated uncontested seats by estimating what the result would have been in light of their socioeconomic composition. In the absence of relevant data, we have not done that herein.
37. In a small number of wards, more than one seat was available, usually to fill an unexpected vacancy because of a councillor's death or retirement. Such wards are also excluded from our analyses.
38. Labour obtained 31% of the votes in 1931 and 26% in 1968, in each case failing to win a single ward.
39. This method for calculating electoral bias was introduced by Ralph H. Brookes, "Electoral Distortion in New Zealand," Australian Journal of Politics and History, V (1959), 218-223;
40. Ralph H. Brookes, idem, "The Analysis of Distorted Representation in Two-Party, Single-Member Elections," Political Science, XII (1960) 158-167.
41. Brookes' method was further developed by Johnston, Rossiter, and Pattie, "Integrating and Decomposing the Sources of Partisan Bias: Brookes' Method and the Impact of Redistricting in Great Britain," Electoral Studies, XVIII (1999), 367-378;
42. Johnston et al., From Votes to Seats. Bias can be calculated for any vote share;
43. values for different distributions lend further insight into its generation (as in Johnston et al., "Labour Electoral Landslides"). The current analyses concentrate on equal shares only, which are the easiest to interpret in terms of generalized concepts of electoral fairness.
44. The full algebra for this measure is in Brookes, "Analysis of Distorted Representation,"
45. Johnston, "Spatial Structure, Plurality Systems and Electoral Bias," Canadian Geographer, XX (1976), 310-328.
46. The basic arguments have been further rehearsed in Johnston et al., Seats to Votes. In effect, Brooke's algebra evaluates what proportion of the bias is attributable to variations between the two parties in the relative size of the wards that they would win with equal vote shares, the relative turnout in the wards that they would win, and the relative efficiency of their vote distributions (the ratio of effective to wasted and surplus votes).
47. Turnouts were high in 1979 because the city-council elections were held on the same day as the general election.
48. If the third party had performed much less well, the third-placed rather than the second-placed party might have won the ward, because the third party drew most of its support from it. No data are available to assess whether this was ever the case.
49. Efficiency is the goal of many gerrymanderes in the United States.
50. Rallings and Thrasher, Local Elections in Britain (London, 1997).
51. The general election analyses for the whole century are reported in Johnston et al., "Conservative Century."
52. More detailed analyses of the post-1945 trends can be found in Johnston et al., Votes to Seats;
53. Johnston et al., idem, "Labour Electoral Landslides."